On the difference between the rational and non-rational life

[trdsf]

Are you a musician or good at kareoke?  I mean it's not like you are starting at the begining of a song, singing the exact lyrics and tempo and hit right on it, or maybe you are?  Also it's not a coincidence that the station you prefer plays the same songs over and over again that they also prefer.

I am a musician, in fact, and I'm by and large starting at or near the beginning and carrying on.  And even though it's a channel dedicated (or Dead-icated) to one band (and their various solo/side projects, so their songs are in the mix, too), it's a band with a huge repertoire, and I'm catching the concert hour when I tune in, so I'm getting not only the band's original songs, but the covers they've done.

Isn't statistics fun?  :D

[trdsf]

Okay, I have my concert stats in hand, and the song I nailed today was even more frequently played than the first one.  The raw percentage is 0.87% of getting the correct song, although I should imagine that getting as close as I did to being in synch would shrink the odds considerably.

Even so, we're still not in the area of the odds necessary to hit the Powerball, or the MegaMillions.  It's probably in the vicinity of the odds of being struck by lightning once in your lifetime: about 1 in 12000.

I'll keep that in mind the next time I'm outdoors during a storm.

[trdsf]

I bought lottery tickets.  I expect it to be wasted money.  If I hit big, then I will begin to consider the possibility of psychic awareness.  But there will need to be laboratory tests and everything.  Now where's my old 'Studmuffins of Science' calendar...

[Mike Cl]

I bought lottery tickets.  I expect it to be wasted money.  If I hit big, then I will begin to consider the possibility of psychic awareness.  But there will need to be laboratory tests and everything.  Now where's my old 'Studmuffins of Science' calendar...

And when you get really polished with this skill (for a skill it must surely be) you can take the Skeptics challenge and win that million they offer.  The physic dollars will just roll in!!!

[Unbeliever]

I often read while listening to talk radio. Occasionally I will be reading a particular word at the same time someone on the radio uses that word. Usually not such a common word, either. I've never calculated the odds of such a thing, but they can't be too bad, as this happens at least 2 or 3 times a week.

I've never even considered the possibility of psi powers being involved. I'm not psychic, just psychotic.

[trdsf]

Predictably, I promptly forgot where I put the lottery tickets.  XD

[Drummer Guy]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bptjghTNUkE

[trdsf]

I was thinking about that episode.  :D

[Munch]

It's all just coincidence based on a numbers game of preconceived thoughts at a moment in time. I was thinking about cartoon series I watched years ago (it being tiny toon adventures) and not long after when talking to my old school friend he mentioned the show, and I said that's a funny coincidence. I put it down to the fact we both use to watch the show and so attributed memory on something from both our pasts we happened to be thinking about when thinking about one another, which had more chance of it being that cartoon then something we didn't have in common.

[trdsf]

Oh, definitely.  And add to that the fact that we tend to remember the unusual incidences and not the unusual ones.  I remember the times that I don't match up with my radio now, because I'm going out of my way to keep track, but I'm sure a year, even just six months from now if you asked me how many times I hit and how many times I missed, I could tell you the first but not the last.  I like the way Tim Minchin put it when he was on The Infinite Monkey Cage -- "Sure, the chances of any particular thing happening are small, but there are a lot of things happening."  And when, by a stroke of statistics, it happens to us, we remember, and we have no reason at all to remember the millions of odd coincidences that don't happen to us because they didn't happen.

Compare Robert Anton Wilson and the 23 enigma -- and after reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy, you will start seeing 23s everywhere (and 17s, but to a lesser extent).  We humans are so good at seeing patterns, we even see them where they don't actually exist.